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Friday, December 21, 2007

A landmark of sorts

According to the Commisssion's EUR-LEX database, some time this month the EU passed its 100,000th law. The search reveals that 100,206 pieces of secondary legislation have been passed since 1957. Thanks for that.

To put that into perspective, if you read a law every working day (it would probably take you a bit longer to do any meaningful research of course) then you could read up on them all within about 426 years.

But wait - there is good news. If you only look at those still in force there are "only" 24,657 laws to bone up on, which would take "just" 104 years to get up to speed with.

That said, the stock of EU laws in force has grown by and average of 1,793 over the last five years. So the pile would be growing all the time.